How hard could your freeze have been? Was it worse than 19 degrees for several nights in a row? Year after year we get many nights of "hard freeze" and I've never seen a lawn that did not recover. I do see many people renovating their lawns this spring. After not watering for two full years, a lot of lawns were lost and became weed patches. Even the guy down the street who never waters ever renovated his lawn. Now he's diligently watering every day. It will be interesting to see what happens when he reverts to not watering. I suspect you have other problems. How often do you normally water? How low do you mow? How often do you fertilize? What is carpet grass? Around here St Augustine is called carpet grass. Bermuda will not be a problem unless you mow the St Aug low. If you let it get high, the bermuda will disappear. As long as St Aug gets water regularly, it will predominate. And how do you have 350 neighbors? Let's see, 350 neighbors at 1 acre each is 350 acres or 30 acres more than half a section. I suppose that is possible.

Thanks to everyone for their replies. The grass certainly isn't everybody's cup of tea. (My wife is not a big fan.) I really like it. Every one has green grass. I just want my lawn to be different. I also like variegated plants (you can see my variegated dwarf bamboo in the second photo), so when I found out there was a variegated form of St. Augustine, I went searching for it. I finally found a small nursery in San Diego that had about 100 plugs for sale. It spreads agressively like regular St. Augustine.

According to the info on "kikyu grass", kikyu looks similar to "St. augustine". The stuff I was asking about is very thin, much thinner than a blade of "St. augustine". That's why I thought it might be bermudagrass. The scan is perhaps misleading because there's no reference in the shot like a penny to gauge the size of the blade. My bad. The scanned plant section is actually about 3 inches top to bottom.

My house was on the back of a 1-acre lot on the edge of town. The only tall grass was back by the house, so you had to stop and look kinda hard to see that the grass was that tall. If you were going to be offended, you had to stop and make a big deal out of it. When it's all the same height, it still looks manicured, especially at a distance. Well it turns out there was an ordinance against eyesore lots. The ordinance had words to the effect that you could not have piles of junk with weeds, grass, or plants growing 18 inches high. We all know what this ordinance is there for - so people will not toss their junk on the street and let grass and weeds grow up through it. I did not have piles of junk. I could walk down my street and find at least 5 other houses with piles of trash and weeds growing up through them for 6 months or more. The problem with my house is that it used to belong to a prominent lady in local politics and the church. She was one of those "GET OFF MY LAWN" people who took exceptional pride in the appearance of the yard. She passed away and it went to hell. A guy bought the house to rent the rooms and I bought from him. He let half the lawn die completely. All this happened so fast that the neighbors and friends of the original lady seriously resented my "letting the lawn go." So I was selected for one-time enforcement of the ordinance. I showed up at a city hall meeting and convinced them they needed to print a lot more signs and enforce the rules everywhere in town. They did that and quickly overwhelmed the enforcement employees. I also took issue with the word, plants, in the ordinance. Strict wording of the ordinance would prohibit any plants taller than 18 inches. Everyone has plants taller than that. I started mowing the lawn down to 17 inches to test my skills at passive aggression. A year later they rewrote the ordinance taking the plant/grass/weed height down to 12 inches. So I mowed at 11 inches. Mowing that high takes a string trimmer and actually goes pretty fast - much faster than mowing with a mower. So it was nice for awhile and then not so much fun, but I did learn a lot about lawn care.